


too short for standalones

by catchafallingstarfish (spaceboy_niko)



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Fake AH Crew, Fight Club AU, Immortal Fake AH Crew, Implied/Referenced Torture, InkHeart AU, Morning After, Narcolepsy, Soulmate-Identifying Timers, Wicked AU, funky weird brain shit, poking around in your skull is not recommended by any health professionals
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-29
Updated: 2018-10-02
Packaged: 2019-03-11 03:07:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 5,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13515375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spaceboy_niko/pseuds/catchafallingstarfish
Summary: the tiny rtah fic dumping ground. things that i never bothered to make into proper stories.





	1. the wicked au (8/17)

**Author's Note:**

> just a quick note!  
> the things in here are all very short. like, only a couple hundred words short for some of them.  
> chapters have the date they were written (month/year) so we hopefully won't find anything too old or terrible lmao  
> in most cases, the only editing i'll have done is properly capitalising everything and fixing formatting.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> based off 'loathing' from the musical wicked!

“To my dearest Geoffrey,” Gavin’s letter began. “And Griffon, too.”

“Dear Lindsay,” Michael began.

“There’s been some confusion over rooming here.” Geoff and Lindsay, miles apart, both raised their eyebrows in concern.

“But of course I’ll keep an eye on Dan! That’s how you’d want me to respond, right?” Geoff breathed a sigh of relief.

“But, you know me. Mogar will rise above it! Is that how you’d want me to respond to that? I dunno.” Lindsay chuckled quietly.

“Anyways, there’s been some confusion because, you see, my roommate is…”

Geoff squinted at the scribbled-out words - loud, sweary, broke things - before shaking his head and reading ahead to Gavin’s clearer description. “He’s…unusual, and exceedingly peculiar, and pretty much impossible to describe…” Geoff scoffed. Exceedingly peculiar, how very British.

“…he’s fucking BLOND, Lindsay!” There was a hole in the paper where Michael’s pen had stabbed through.

States away from each other, Geoff and Lindsay shrugged. “He’ll be fine.”


	2. soulmate timers (8/17)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> au in which everyone's got a soulmate timer on their wrist

The novelty of checking his timer every day wore off for Jeremy. It’s not like he was in any rush to find his soulmate. They were evidently doing fine. His timer was still going, blood pulsing under his skin with the dark seconds.

In an absent glance, Jeremy saw the numbers whizzing by on his timer. He shrugged it off at first, then stared at it in shock.

The time had rushed from days (weeks, months even) to a matter of hours.

Was that normal?

He couldn’t be the only one who that had happened to.

Jeremy pondered as he sat on a chair with uneven legs at the coffee shop near his office. Maybe, he thought, rocking the chair back and forth, they’re going to be a new intern at the office when I get back. Or I’ll meet them at drinks with the lads tonight.

He held his wrist up again. Five, four, three, two–

“Shit!”

Jeremy felt a leg collide with his - shit, when had he stuck his leg out? – and leapt to his feet as the man sprawled onto the floor, coffee spilling over the floor.

“Oh my god, are you okay?”

The man stood up, brushing off the knees of his dress pants and fixing his tie. “I am so sorry, I obviously wasn’t watching where I was going, I got distracted–“

“Hey, man, it’s okay, I’ll buy you a new coffee–"

The man laughed. “No, it’s fine. Pretty sure I need to cut my dependence on the stuff anyway.”

They laugh, a little awkwardly, and Jeremy impulsively stuck out his hand. “Jeremy.”

“Trevor. Nice to meet you, even if it was under strange circumstances.”

“I really am sorry–"

Trevor waves it off. "Like I said, you don’t need to worry about it. I, uh, have a meeting I’m late for, but thanks for the offer!”

And with that, he rushes out.

Jeremy only notices his timer’s gone down to zero when he goes to throw his cup away.


	3. inkheart au (9/17)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ryan's a silvertongue, and geoff finds out under some unusual circumstances

Geoff slammed his controller onto his desk and crowed in victory, Minecraft character standing high atop the golden tower.

“And Geoff wins the Tower of Pimps! Hand it over, Ryan!”

Ryan switched off his capture and muttered something inaudible over the outbursts from the other players.

“Can’t hear ya, buddy, you’re going to have to speak up,” Geoff replied amicably, clicking around on his screen to deal with the footage.

“I don’t have it.”

Geoff turned to Ryan, a half-serious look on his face. “Very funny, Ryan. Now where is it?”

“I…lost it.”

“Bullshit. Your desk is one of the least messy here. Either you’ve hidden it, or you’ve done something to it that you think I’ll fire you for.” Geoff spun around in his chair as the room slowly emptied and folded his hands in his lap, an eyebrow raised quizzically.

Ryan sighed, and for a moment Geoff genuinely thought he’d probed too far. “It’s…it’s not normal, what happened to the Tower. Promise me you won’t give me shit?”

“Sure, man, whatever. The only possible circumstance for that would be if you shoved it up your ass and it broke while they were removing it, so you’re all good.”

Ryan took a deep breath. “Okay. The Tower…well, it’s in Macbeth.”

“Ryan, what the actual fuck?”

“I don’t know, man, it’s been happening my entire life, I was sitting at my desk reading Macbeth aloud to myself and all of a sudden there’s a fucking dagger on my desk!”

“Nothing out of the ordinary, then,” Geoff interjected.

“Shut up, Geoff. Anyways, I check my desk to see if anything else has appeared and the fucking Tower’s gone! And the worst bit is–" Ryan cut himself off to rummage in his bag under his desk, pulling out a fairly battered copy of Macbeth, complete with the coffee stains typical of a college student’s textbook. Flipping through the pages, he gets to a dog-eared section and jabs a finger at the page.

Geoff leans over to read where he’s pointing:

 

_Is this a tower which I see before me, the podium toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. I have won thee not, and yet I see thee still._

 

“Holy shit. You weren’t kidding when you said it was in Macbeth.”

Ryan shut the book with more force than necessary. “So that’s where the tower is, and if you want it on your desk, you may as well just take this god damn copy of Macbeth and keep it on the podium.”

Geoff gingerly took the book from Ryan and balanced it on the podium on his desk. It wobbled before falling and sliding off to one side.

“So, does that happen with every book?”

“Only when I read it aloud. It’s a nightmare reading to my kids. The number of teddy bears that have been sacrificed to A.A. Milne books is incredible.”

Geoff made a noise of sympathy.


	4. mornings (10/17)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> just some morning after fluff

Michael wakes up gradually.

The first thing he notices is the warmth pressed into his back, the soft tickle of a breath on his neck and the slightly uncomfortable stickiness between his thighs.

It’s followed by the gentle sound of Ryan snoring quietly, and the muffled beat of rain behind the curtained window. The smell of the wet earth is faint but there, mingling with Ryan’s aftershave from the day before and the smell of both of them.

Michael’s mouth feels sandpapery, and tastes vaguely like he tried eating a mothball. He cracks open an eye as he attempts to unstick his dry lips without too much damage.

It’s blurry without his glasses, but Michael can see that the room is dim, and it’s bleak enough outside for only a little light to shine through the cracks between the curtains. He isn’t sure what the time is – could be before sunrise, could be a grey mid-afternoon. Their clothes from the day before are at least all together, and the pile looks to be somewhat folded.

He moves an arm to rub at the gritty sleep in his eye, and Ryan’s soft snores hitch and stop. He mumbles something that Michael feels on his shoulderblade more than he hears in the quiet room.

“Morning to you too.”

A warm hand wanders around Michael’s body, skidding up along his ribcage and dipping down to his legs. He feels Ryan frown against him.

“Sticky. Go clean up.”

Michael ponders it, then decides, “Nah. Nicer in here with you.”


	5. the bet (5/17)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> fahc-verse. michael and ryan have a bet going.  
> warning for mentions of torture bc this is fahc ryan, who are we kidding

Ryan smirked below his mask at the man shaking underneath him. “Thank you sir, your information’s been very helpful. But we can’t let the police find out you helped us, can we? That would just end badly for all of us.”

The man screamed, something muffled, and Ryan frowned. “I can’t understand you. You’ve been so coherent up until now. And here I thought you’d have some poignant last words to say.”

Ryan shrugs, an oh well, and as his finger’s drawing away from the smoking gun he’s texting Michael with his other hand:

_And that makes four._

He poses for a picture in front of his informant’s chained-up corpse, and some weird part of his mind tells him to do a peace sign. At least it’s different from the past three.

The dots flash up below his message, and his screen lights up with a video of Michael grinning like a toddler and waving a dismembered arm cheerfully. Ryan can vaguely make out a tangle of limbs and guts colouring the smoking asphalt behind him.

Michael’s voice rings through his tinny speakers. “I’m up to seven now, bitch!” His laugh is cut off as the video ends.

Ryan sighs. _I guess you win then_ , he texts back.

_Meet me back at the penthouse and give me my fifty bucks._


	6. heistin' (4/17)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> fahc michael. that's it.

There was something about heists that got into Michael - a need that had to be satisfied, a sort of itch that was scratched when a brick of C4 sent a tanker up in flames or brass knuckles caught his lip wrong and added blood to his wide grin.

And after every escape, when he’d practically fall off his bike next to Ryan in the garage, the hit of adrenalin jittered in his veins for hours and hours, until he’d crash and burn with a cigarette dangling between his fingers.

When they’d loudly enter the apartment, guns slung over their shoulders and clacking against the grenades in their bags, Michael would pull Gavin’s hair behind his gaudy sunglasses and bring his head down for a kiss on the cheek and a hip-bump out of tradition, and a cut of the pay from Geoff twenty minutes later.

Honestly, Michael couldn’t be asking for a much better life than this.

But such things couldn’t always be perfect, as things often tend to be.

And when Michael found himself blindly throwing a grenade into the road behind him with Gavin screaming in his ear and praying that _dear God please don’t let them be behind me_ with his gut jumping in his throat with every rev of a bike or car behind him until the glint of Ryan’s bike swept through his peripheral and Geoff’s car easily slid by on his other side and he could breathe again.

Or he’d taunt the fucker who tried to take him at close range with a nightstick. “C’mon, asshole, whatcha got for me?” he’d say, flashing teeth and gold in a wild-eyed smile and blocking hits with the barrel until he could ram the butt of his rifle into the sorry bastard’s jaw.

Geoff sighed at the bend in the shotgun, but shoved him patriarchally as Gavin draped himself over Michael’s aching shoulder and tutted at the split lip.


	7. narcolepsy (5/18)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> corona jokingly prompted me to write "dealing w ur partners fuckin narcolepsy" and me being the overachieving bitch i am here it is  
> it's long but it's in here bc i don't wanna do anything else w it  
> idk shit about narcolepsy

Jeremy was somehow jammed into the heist car with the rest of them, squashed between Michael and Gavin with his assault rifle nudging Gavin’s laptop and his knees bumping Ryan’s elbow in the centre console.

Geoff talked over the chaos. “Alright, J, this’s your first heist, so we’re gonna try and get you out in piece, okay? You know the plan. Gavin’s gonna stay in here and do all the fancy camera shit he does–“

“Not if you don’t keep that thing away from my bloody laptop, I won’t!” Gavin squawked as they took a corner and the butt of Jeremy’s gun knocked the lid down.

“Gav’s gonna stay in here and work his magic,” Geoff repeated slightly louder, “Michael’s gonna set up fuses outside the site, and you and Ryan are gonna infiltrate. You’ve done that solo before, right? Good. So you and– Ryan!”

Ryan seemed to sit up a little straighter and tweaked the bottom of his mask.

Geoff sighed. “Ryan and Jeremy will go in. Stealth mission, Ryan. Stealth. Mission. What did I say, Ryan?”

“It’s a stealth mission,” Ryan parroted back like a kid being told off.

“Which means?”

“Don’t kill everyone I see.”

“Good. Oh, and J?”

“Yeah?” Jeremy replied, heart thumping in his throat as the car stopped.

“Keep an eye on Ryan for us, will you?”

Jeremy saluted and piled out of the car after Michael.

Michael disappeared round to the back of the car and Ryan squared his shoulders, scoping out the area. He jerked his head one way and Jeremy followed obediently.

They scaled a ladder and climbed the roof, where Ryan pried open a grate. “You first. You’re less likely to get stuck.”

Jeremy slid down the air vent and heard Ryan land behind him as he began to crawl along, checking his location with Gavin and the glimpses he got between the grilles.

It soon occurred to him that he hadn’t heard any sound of Ryan moving behind him for quite some time.

Had he turned off down another shaft? Had he gotten stuck? Or, worst of all, had he gotten caught?

“Ryan? How you going back there?”

No reply.

“Ryan? Ryan!” he hissed into his mic.

A frantic shuffling noise came from behind him and a hurried reply came through his ear. “Sorry, Jeremy, kind of went out for the count there. I’m just a bit behind you, I’ll catch up pretty quick.”

Jeremy rolled his eyes and waited.

A tug at his ankle made him twist around, and Ryan nodded at him to keep going.

“Grate up ahead, coast is clear in that hallway, guard’s not due to patrol there for another ten,” Gavin’s voice came in his ear. “From there, it’s a piece of cake. Michael boi’s got C4 strapped to the outside wall of that hall, so you can nip in, get the stuff, wait for the boom, nip out, no problems. Easy peasy.”

 _Easy for him to say, he’s not the one crawling through an air vent._ He could practically feel Ryan roll his eyes behind him.

Jeremy prised up the grate and dropped down into the hallway with a grunt, and Ryan followed him.

Gavin directed them through the hallways and cracked the safe for them, and Jeremy tucked the small package they’d been assigned to get into his vest.

“Alright, now it should be an easy out, but Michael’s come into a tiny bit of trouble around the detonation area. You guys should be all good, though. Just find somewhere to hunker down and then run towards the giant explosion.”

“I thought normally the advice was to run _away_ from the explosion?” Ryan asked drily.

“Yeah, but we don’t do normal. Now, go go go!”

They hid in what looked like a former janitor’s storeroom – hell, it even still smelled of damp and cleaning products – and waited quietly. Jeremy twisted his hands together and looked around in the semi-darkness, but there was nothing he hadn’t seen before– and nothing of use to him, because none of the cartridges would fit his current gun. He settled on examining Ryan instead.

Ryan seemed to be staring at the opposite wall, though Jeremy couldn’t tell through his mask. His breathing was slow and even, and he looked, for the first time since Jeremy had met him, relaxed.

And then he made a funny noise.

Ryan _snored_.

Jeremy stared at him in disbelief. _Was he…asleep?_

“Ryan,” he whispered, tentative not to blow their cover.

Ryan made the noise again, and Jeremy sighed.

A resounding boom rattled his eardrums, and Ryan jerked awake.

“Go! Go!” Gavin yelled in his ear, and they bolted out of the storeroom and down the hall to where there was now a crumbling hole and the last sign of a sprinting Michael.

They dashed around the corner and leapt into the car, Jeremy squishing Michael into the middle seat this time and Ryan taking shotgun again. Geoff squealed the tyres and they sped out of the lot and onto the highway.

“Good work, team!” Geoff crowed as he gave the car more gas to overtake a semi. Ryan took of his mask and breathed a sigh of relief, shaking his hair out.

“Geoff, any reason why you didn’t tell me you’d buddied me up with the narcoleptic?”

“Oh yeah,” Geoff said, and laughed. “Forgot about that. Anyway, didn’t affect your mission too much, did it?”

“He fell asleep in the vent when we were trying to get in!” Jeremy shouted. “And when we were waiting for Michael to detonate the wall!”

Ryan scrunched down in his seat sheepishly. “Sorry.”

Geoff reached over with one hand and the car swung wildly as he ruffled Ryan’s hair. “It’s good, you’re still one of our best. Gonna take more than you falling asleep all the damn time to make us kick you.”


	8. is that a gun in your pocket? (5/18)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ryan shoots gavin in the head, but he's immortal, so it's okay

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sits down on the floor  
> i havent had much time to write lately bc school is Heck so this is short but yknow. i’ll have time soonish i guess exams’ll be over in a couple weeks  
> anyways, i was immensely tempted to call this "giving head" but i felt like that kinda took away from what happens here

“Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just happy to see me, love?” Gavin purred.

“No, it’s a gun,” Ryan stated matter-of-factly, pulling the handgun out from the front pocket of his jeans. “And I wouldn’t say I’m happy to see you.”

Gavin swallowed as the safety clicked, and laughed uneasily as he lifted his sunglasses up from his eyes. “Now, really, I wouldn’t say that’s necessary–“

“Well, you did ask,” Ryan said mildly, not moving the barrel from where it was aimed neatly between Gavin’s eyes.

“But Ryan, I’m unarmed!” Gavin threw his leather-gloved hands hastily above his head, almost knocking his sunglasses off from where he’d carefully perched them.

Ryan maintained his level gaze, face paint not even twitching. “You’ve tried that trick on me before. You weren’t unarmed. Kdin had to put stitches in my pelvis. My _pelvis_ , Gavin.”

“And that was a shitty month for both of us, wasn’t it? Don’t shoot, Ryan, hear me out–“

“No,” Ryan said, and pulled the trigger.

Gavin barely saw Ryan’s finger move before the force of the bullet sent him backwards.

When he woke up, he had the worst headache of his life. Sure, he’d been shot in the head before, but he’d never gotten used to the feeling.

“Bloody hell, Ryan, what was that for? You’ve never shot me in the head before!” Gavin sat up carefully and took off his sunglasses, inspecting the damage. “Oh, look at that, you _broke_ them!” He pointed accusingly with the shiny broken arm of his glasses.

Ryan shrugged. “Not my problem. Geoff’ll buy you new ones.”

Gavin took off a glove and probed around in the exit wound with practised hands, wincing up at Ryan. “Good Lord, you couldn’t even get it all the way clean through! Bad form, Ryan.”

“It’s the gun!” Ryan said defensively as Gavin pulled out half the shell.

“Yeah, right. A shitty workman blames his tools. Where’d the other half go?”

“Think I heard it hit the wall.”

Gavin half-flopped back onto the floor, propping himself up on his elbows to protect the open back of his head. “Go get it?”

Ryan rolled his eyes. “And the chunks of your skull along with it?”

“Yeah, those’d be nice. And a medkit. There’s blood running into my eyes. Do you reckon,” he called after Ryan’s retreating boots, “that I should raise the motion to Geoff that we should stop testing weapons on each other?”

“Shut up, or I’ll properly open up that exit wound of yours.”


	9. the paper street soap factory (6/18)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> i'm reclaiming fight club for the gays and the ah fans

Ryan kneels on the rooftop, the hot concrete burning through the knees of his jeans, with a gun in his mouth.

The Vagabond – James, his mind touches fleetingly before reverting back to the more comfortable Vagabond – has his finger on the trigger, thumb over the safety where he’s flicked it back. The gun has silencer holes drilled in the barrel, because most of the sound of a gunshot is from the expanding air and the shockwave, and by letting all that pent-up air escape no one will ever hear the gunshot unless they’re right there, like Ryan is.

Ryan knows this because the Vagabond knows this.

Ryan also knows that if you drill the holes wrong, the gunshot’ll blow off your hand.

The Vagabond smiles down at him, paint hiding most of his features but Ryan knows the guy’s a chiseled god underneath the mess of colour on his face, and presses the gun a little further into his throat. Ryan doesn’t gag.

“We could live forever. We’d be legends. We’d never grow old,” the Vagabond says invitingly.

Ryan tongues over the acrid taste of the gunpowder in the barrel, moving the slick metal out of his throat and into his cheek, and says Vagabond, you’re thinking of vampires.

Eight minutes.

The Vagabond dismisses him. Ryan guesses he’s not really that important right now, seeing as the building they’re standing and kneeling on is going to be dust and rubble in about ten minutes thanks to the nice batch of homemade plastics packed in around the foundations. Ryan knows that if you take a one to three ratio of nitric and sulfuric acids, respectively, and carry out the whole mess in an ice bath, then add glycerin dropwise with an eyedropper, you can make nitroglycerin, and if you mix your nitroglycerin with sawdust you can get a good ol’-fashioned plastic explosive.

He knows this because the Vagabond knows this.

Ryan also knows that you can mix nitro with cotton and Epsom salts or something similar, and get a pretty similar effect. Same with paraffin. Paraffin’s never worked for Ryan.

Seven minutes.

So Ryan and the Vagabond wait on top of the building, patiently waiting out their final ten minutes, Ryan counting out the seconds as accurately as he can while focusing on his breathing into the barrel. It’s cold up there, cold enough to make his breath fog up the gunmetal, and if he looks over the edge all he can see is cloud. There’s approximately forty-three floors underneath them, counting parking lot and basement levels, and it’s godawful quiet up here. Makes you realise how insignificant you are, up here alone with your thoughts, not knowing or understanding anything, just waiting to die.

The street and parking below them is carpeted with a Persian weave of people, looking up, their eyes torn upwards by the sounds of breaking glass below them. There’s chaos breaking out on the floors under them. Ryan is sure this is the Vagabond’s doing, all of his lackeys, and he doesn’t question it. Doesn’t have to.

Ryan discovers that with the barrel of a revolver in your mouth, pressing down cool and slippery on your tongue and intruding into your throat, you can only talk in vowels.

More broken glass, raining down like emptying birdshot into a flock of pigeons, and he hears something tumble into the crowd.

The plastic explosives in the carpark level are packed in tight, bound to the supporting structure to stop them from exploding out into the carpark and making sure the concrete takes the full strain of the blast.

Six, five, and four minutes pass without him noticing, too absorbed in the slide of his tongue against the sour-tasting barrel with his every breath, and Ryan wonders if this is what giving head feels like.

Ryan knows the gun is there just in case the cops get up to them sooner than they planned.

To the cops, and to God, or whatever higher power is watching this sorry chapter of someone’s life, it looks like one man, near-crouched on the edge of a building with a gun in his own mouth, but it’s the Vagabond holding the gun and dancing over the trigger, making Ryan’s breath hitch.

Ryan and the Vagabond, at the edge of the roof, with a gun in Ryan’s mouth that tastes like it hasn’t been cleaned of old shot and its victims.

Three minutes, and Ryan is preparing to brace for the shudder that is sure to come.

Then somebody yells across the roof.

“Wait!” and it’s footsteps as well, the sounds all blown away by the wind, and it’s Michael near-staggering towards him.

Michael’s coming towards Ryan, just Ryan because the Vagabond is, poof, gone. Which makes sense, because the Vagabond is Ryan’s hallucination, and not Michael’s. Like a magic trick and a puff of fake smoke, the Vagabond’s disappeared, and now Ryan is one man, at the edge of the roof, holding a gun in his mouth.

The cold wind in Ryan’s eyes makes him squint, but he’s pretty sure he sees everyone behind Michael, recognises Gavin’s unruly mop and Geoff’s inked and coloured arms and Jack’s beard.

“We followed you up,” Michael yells over the wide expanse of the roof. “You don’t have to do this, put the gun down.”

And more behind them, good God, and all of them talking to him, voices flowing to him on the whipping wind.

They say, “Wait.”

They say, “Stop.”

“We can help.”

“Let us help.”

The wide, heavy beating of police helicopters buffets him around, but he sticks his balance.

Go, on, get out, he yells. The whole building’s gonna go down.

“We know,” Michael yells back.

This is news to Ryan.

I’m not killing myself, he yells with all the power he has left in his lungs. I’m killing the Vagabond.

Ryan has a surprisingly calming feeling of his life flashing before his eyes. He remembers everything.

“It’s definitely not love,” Michael shouts, “but I think I like you, like you said.”

A minute, give or take ten seconds.

Michael likes the Vagabond.

“Nope, you. I’m pretty sure I know the difference,” Michael shouts.

Ryan accepts that as the final thing he’s going to hear, and there’s a resounding.

Nothing.

No explosion.

Ryan tucks the gun barrel into his other cheek, and says, Vagabond, you mixed nitro and paraffin, didn’t you.

You know just as well as me paraffin never works.

He has to do this.

The helicopters are landing.

And he pulls the trigger.

So that’s that. The Vagabond is dead. So is he.

And heaven is unnervingly sterile and quiet and angels bring him flowers and people write telling him he’ll get better, and God is an asshole in a white coat who Ryan is sure is trying to get him out of there as soon as possible.


	10. nihilism (8/18)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> something something something i watched kill your darlings and now im just publishing things from drafts while i await my inevitable exam

“I am a devout adherent of the school of thought pioneered by Mr Dorian Gray,” Gavin said through a billowy mouthful of smoke.

“He doesn’t exist, Gavin. He’s fictional,” Michael replied distastefully.

“Fictional, yes,” Gavin said with a dismissive twirl of his hand, trailing smoke through the dim light. “Fictional, and therefore, through Wilde’s acknowledgement of his own flaws and his consequent choice to ignore them in the construction of Dorian–“ and he rolled the first name over in his mouth, seductively, as if it were melting– “he is perfect. And so, a perfect example of the nihilistic hedonism that is characteristic of the upper echelons of the Victorian era and Roaring Twenties. We see it as a recurring philosophy. Gatsby, Wooster, Fitzgerald himself– all scholars of the way of life that can be summed up in five simple words: nothing matters, so why not?”

He did have a point, Michael had to concede.

“And that, dear, is my answer to all questions preceded with ‘why’. Why do I study the classics? Why not? Why are you planning on dropping out – don’t lie to me, I know you want to, to which I say, why not? Why do we drink? Why not? Why do I smoke–“ he emphasised the word with a long pull of his cigarette, never breaking eye contact with Michael in a way that brought a hot flush up his neck “–and why do you hate it? Why not, and why not? Why do I say these things, which rile you up when I start saying the things that ruin the perfect white-picket-fence ranch-house-in-suburbia wet dream you have of your future? Why do you let me weave these words around you, and why–“ and suddenly Gavin was right there, breathing heat and nicotine into his mouth and Michael’s mouth was dry and expectant “–why does it seem like you like it?”

Michael stared into Gavin’s blown eyes through his smoke, barely breathing for fear of shattering the mirage in front of him, and then Gavin laughed and was gone, cigarette jammed back between his lips as he rummaged through the cluttered space, searching through paperbacks with the urgency of a madman.

“Why not, Michael, why not?” He held a cheap-looking crumpled paperback aloft triumphantly, flicking through the pages to find a place he’d evidently turned to many a time. “Listen to this! ‘There was to be a new hedonism that was to recreate life…its aim was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might be! It was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is itself but a moment!’”

He shut the book with a one-handed finality. “The wisdom divulged to us by Oscar Wilde. We must live by our experiences, and not by the consequences of our experiences. Of course, if we are to consider the work of Newton, every action must have an equal and opposite reaction, but if our lives are too short for our actions to have any consequence, then therefore we can consider both Wilde and Newton frauds!”

Michael’s head swam from smoke and the chaos of Gavin’s argument and his room.

“But I’m a student of the classics, and not an analyst, nor a scientist, so therefore there is no place for logic in my life, and therefore I have proven my own arguments invalid. So when it comes to the inevitable end of the universe, when the God I don’t believe in lines you up for judgement and when the void that I believe in calls me, none of this will matter. Theologians and cultists alike will bicker, Michael. Oh, they will bicker. But they’re just like me, in the sense that there is no place for logic and reason in their lives, and when the time comes for them to meet whatever eldritch deity they devote their lives to, their lives will have been for naught except wearing silly robes and keeping a stable job, respectively.”

Gavin frowned as he tried to drag one last gasping spark of life out of his cigarette, then frowned and dropped it to the coffee table, crushing it under his heel as he stood on the table with an ominous creak.

“But I digress. Your existence is, by your school of thought, dictated by an omnipotent being with little to no respect for your circumstances or your wants. It’s a long, slow, unsatisfying grind to the end.” Gavin pivoted on the edge of the table and faced Michael, lighting a new cigarette and balancing it delicately between his long fingers. “But my place on earth, although utterly meaningless in the long run, is entirely what i dictate it to be,” he said, tapping the ash off his cigarette with every word. “Fast-paced, impulsive, a little rough sometimes – but that’s just the way I like it.”

Michael didn’t know if he was talking about life anymore.

“Admit it, dear, your life has no meaning, you will be forgotten, the sands of time will run through your fingers like water and soon there will be nothing left for you but l’appel du vide. The void calls you, Michael,” he said, the slow seductive warmth back in his voice, “so why don’t you have a little fun and ignore it for a while?”


End file.
